


Live Life For Yourself (Keep Your Head Down Low)

by austinthegrouch



Series: Hazy Midmorning Dreams (Why can't I stop writing about Ginny) [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BAMF Ginny Weasley, Bisexual Female Character, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Depression, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Gen, Gender Issues, Giving Ginny the Writing Background She Needs To Work at The Prophet, Mental Health Issues, Multi, POV Ginny Weasley, Pre-Femslash, Strong Female Characters, Writing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 02:24:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16358888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/austinthegrouch/pseuds/austinthegrouch
Summary: Ginny's indescribable even to herself, words piling around her like snow but oh so wrong. She's loved but lonely, a girl but unsatisfied with what people think that implies, a writer who can't express herself beyond her mask, an athlete searching for a high.Self-discovery is a process, especially for a Weasley..





	Live Life For Yourself (Keep Your Head Down Low)

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I've ever written femslash, despite my bisexuality. As a transman, I didn't feel like I had the right. But this story popped in my head and I couldn't stop. Ginny and I may take different paths in the end, but like everything I write, this has roots in my own experiences.

Ginny watches. She always does. Ron said once that she was a stalker, but it's not just Harry she has her eye on. She just doesn't know how to be anything but a watcher.

She's never fit in, forced to be a girl in a family with no space for someone so quirky and shy. Never fits in with the girls at school, quiet when she needs to speak, unable to stop when she needs to not. She hates her long hair even though (or perhaps because) her mother loves it so much. Nothing's ever right and it breaks her piece by piece. 

She'd rather play with one of Ron's broken hand-me-downs than all of the dolls Auntie Muriel sent for every holiday. They're pretty and soft, but they don't belong to her, despite having her name on the box. 

_Ginevra Weasley_. A beautiful name for a princess, but not for a little tomboy from Ottery St. Catchpole. But sometimes she feels like one. Not the nice ones, but the ones locked away from the world. Except she's both the villain and the damsel, constantly fighting herself. Fighting to be _Gin_ when she has no idea what that means. If she's even the heroine.

She starts sneaking a broom from the shed when she's eight, when the twins are off at Hogwarts. Something about it calls to her, her own personal siren. She's spent hours pouring over the Quidditch books her dad gave her. He understands her better than she does, better than her mother ever could. Understands the ache in her soul she can't explain, even to herself.

The broom doesn't leap into her hand immediately. She's not a natural. It wouldn't be worth it if she was. But it does, eventually, and Ginny wants to sob in relief. 

But she doesn't, because she's 8 and one of the boys. She settles onto the broom, careful not to fall, and it's right the way nothing in her life is. She tries to soar, the way she's seen Bill and Charlie do. That effortless motion that makes something in her burn. And it's the best five seconds of her life, utterly free.

Then she crashes down onto the leaves below, luckily spraining her ankle and nothing else. She limps pathetically to her father's shed, who fixes her up and tells her he'll teach her if she promises not to fly alone until she's learned enough. That he knows she'll keep trying and trying if he doesn't. She agrees, and her first flying lessons are something she keeps close to her heart for the rest of her life.

 

Mrs. Lovegood (who insists she call her Pan) is Ginny's first crush, before Harry was little more than a bedtime fantasy. She's taller than her mum, beautiful and blond. But that's not why Gin loves her. It's how she talks, every syllable delicate and elegant, always treating what she and Luna said like it mattered more than anything else in the world. How she makes everyone around her want to be better than they are, and makes them feel warmer than they've ever been, warmer than any spell. She writes her own spellbooks and does her own experiments, creates things no one else ever could. She's the closest thing Ginny's ever seen to a princess, and something in her says that she's better. She hangs on Pan's every word, blushes at her compliments. 

And she's absolutely crushed when she dies, near her 9th birthday. She cries and doesn't know if she'll ever be able to stop. She does. 

Luna's house is so empty and she isn't the same as she used to be and neither is Gin. And she looks so much like Pan but so different in every other way and it hurts. So they stop being best friends, grow apart, and it's the beginning of her many regrets.

Ginny's adrift and sadder than she's ever been, so she hides herself deeper and deeper. She hides behind a veil of words and dreams of a dark-haired boy with glorious green eyes (a perfect contrast to the blonde and blue) who knows the words to soothe her lonely heart. She goes flying almost every night, trying to capture perfection. Or maybe to outrun how helpless she feels, too young to even use magic, to do anything about the shifting of the world around her.

Then Ron leaves too, and she's even lonelier. It's just Ginny, her mother, loving but impossible to talk to, and her father, working at all hours. She takes up new hobbies left and right, anything to fill up the space of this endless year. Her attempts at knitting are atrocious, and she never wants to try again, but it's something she did by herself, with her own hands. 

This is the first time she really tries to write, sharp quill in hand. She starts a diary that no one would ever choose to read in an old black notebook of Charlie's. To her, it's a lifeline. Everything in her head looks so much more real on paper. She writes love poems to the boy she saw on the platform (awful but passionate), talks about how lonely she's always been, how she worries she'll always be. She still dreams about Pan, on cold nights when the ghoul is being particularly feisty.

And when they arrive at the station to pick up Ron, and she glimpses Harry Potter for the second time, she knows this is the beginning of the rest of her life.


End file.
